Something's Happening Here

Domestic terrorism in the US has been on the rise. There has been a rise in hate crimes in the US, as well.  The current head of the FBI, Christopher Wray, warns that white supremacist extremism is "a persistent, pervasive threat." 

But how does the Department of Homeland Security respond to this "persistent, pervasive threat" to the security of the US? Why, naturally, they virtually disband the unit of intelligence analysts looking into domestic terrorism. 

Wait? They stop looking into the actual terrorism that is happening right here in the Homeland? Doesn't that sort of sound like exactly the sort of thing Homeland Security should be doing? 

They are too busy not uniting little children with their families when they have been separated at our border, and too busy finding inadequate facilities to hold these people, and too busy tracking the menstrual cycles of teen girls. These things shouldn't seem as important and meaningful to DHS as addressing actual violence and terror head on, and, well, violence and terror are still very near to hand. 

(And I hear you, people who buy Trump's line about MS-13 and tattoos and "not the best people". Did you know gangs in Central America recruit at knife-tip and gunpoint? That even people who are affiliated with crime might have reasons to try and change their life? That some people want "not a life of crime" to be an actual valid choice for themselves?)

A White Power symbol was found near the burned-out Highlander Center.  Three black churches burn in Louisiana. And political figures receive serious threats--former Senator Jeff Flake describes multiple threats to himself and his family. Congressman Eric Swalwell shared a phone message of a death threat.  A man was arrested for threatening to assassinate Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. 

We are seeing a remarkably hate-charged atmosphere, but there is a theme, and it's one I have been seeing for some time--the rhetoric of Trump, and his racist, anti-journalist, anti-democracy views, that have made his red hat a symbol for far-right extremists. Even if not intended as a symbol for terror or hate, it has become a marker for disruption.  There is a reason why Trump superfans at Fox News demonize a congresswoman in a hijab, or regularly spew the exact line of hate regarding "replacement" that the Christchurch shooter used to justify his massacre, that the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter used, that the Charlottesville tiki-torch folks chanted. 

Maybe there is a reason, also, that the NRA supports far-right groups regarding how to manage their message after a massacre. I don't think it's too far-fetched to say that they, too, have become pro-terrorism. 

There is a sickness here born of dehumanization and othering. But it is supported by people who have become perhaps so cynical and nihilistic that they dismiss these terrible signs as just another form of negative political rhetoric, and can't see it for what it is--fascism, here and now.  The people who support this crap are, naturally, as Hannah Arendt would say, banal--grifters, attention-seekers, losers. But their dedicated and destructive mediocrity, inadequately challenged, is simply appallingly dangerous to any kind of democratic and free way of life. 

I am deeply distrustful of what is happening here. 

But if you were to ask certain DHS folks who the real villains were, perhaps they would say Antifa. And they might very well be patted on the head for their service to the state. 

A Dark and Stormy Night in TrumpWorld

The phrase "it was a dark and stormy night" is a much-parodied line evoking florid prose of a certain level of ridiculousness--of course, nights are actually dark.  "Stormy" is just added as convenient foreshadowing. Things dark and stormy--news at 11! But this being the darkest timeline, "dark and stormy" is now completely accurate for the US state of affairs--the gulf coast of Texas, home to tens of thousands of people and about a third of our oil refining capacity, is bearing the brunt of a category 4 hurricane. The potential for massive flooding, power outages, mass human displacement, loss of life, property loss, and environmental disaster are all laid out there--and on his way to Camp David, President Trump entirely gave his thumbs-up assurance that things would be okay and wished folks in the path of the disaster "Good luck".

I have problems with the response, but whatever. For one thing, you can't begrudge the guy a trip to Camp David, because he naturally needs to rest between vacations, and I personally have come to the conclusion that if he actually sleeps at the White House, he gets visited by the ghosts of Presidents past.

(SCENE:



RN: Dooonald.

DT: Who is that?

RN: This is Richard Nixon, Donald, and I have a message for you.

DT: Richard Nixon? What are you doing here?

RN: Enjoying the air conditioning. The message is: there is no air conditioning where you're going.

END SCENE.)

For another thing, can you expect empathy for people who will suffer at his potential reputational expense? I mean, here they are, poised to lose their property and lives, but has anyone considered how this will make Trump look? Because Trump has.

And while you were looking at the hurricane, here is what Trump is up to:

Hello--Goodbye

As noted the other night, Bannon's time art the White House was, indeed, about to draw to a close (although I'm pretty sure his presence will still be felt.) With Bannon's ouster, the betting window is now taking serious money for how long Sebastian Gorka will remain--I've never really been entirely sure what his job was, myself. I'm not really even sure what the impact on the White House will be--people who did not care for Bannon and thought his associations with the so-called "alt-right" were bad might feel that Bannon's leaving matters, but I can't help but note--Trump remains.

This was a week for other departures as well. After several CEO's left the president's Manufacturing Council and Strategy and Policy Forum, Trump ended them so that they could stop quitting on him. As a tidy capper to Infrastructure Week, Trump also wrapped up plans for an Infrastructure Council by scrapping it. Billionaire Carl Icahn will no longer advise Trump. (Steve Mnuchin's Yale classmates would like him to do the same.)

And the membership of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities sent Trump a "Dear Don" letter, which cleverly spelled out: "resist". His faith advisors are also concerned with what the president has been saying this past week. Pastor A.R. Bernard stepped down.

No wonder, then, that the President and the First Lady will not be attending the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony this coming December--he feels unwanted. I suggest that Trump doesn't have "personnel" problems--he has a Trump problem, and he takes it wherever he goes.

UPDATE: I forgot about all the Digital Council resignations. My apologies. There are just so many.

Terrorism Happened Here--Call it That

When a car apparently intentionally plows into a group of people participating in a counter-protest to the Nazi shindig in Charlottesville, it should be pretty obvious that you should call it terrorism, and disavow it, and condemn that sort of thing. Many politicians recognized at once the enormity of the situation, and called for the event to be treated as the terror that it was intended to be.  This was the obvious response, the necessary response. Bigotry and violence are a bad and unnecessary combination in a diverse nation where we value free speech. The counter-protestors had all the same rights as the so-called "alt-right" protestors (although I prefer to just think of them as Nazis, because, well, what they do, say and think). 

Our president, though, decided to make a comment condemning violence "on many sides".  How utterly inadequate of the man.  As if there was a movement that somehow used violence against white supremacy on the regular. None such exists. And yet, look at what the Trump Administration has stood for--they choose to ignore right wing extremism in favor of Islamic terror, even though RW extremism is more of a threat.  Recently, Sebastian Gorka, a guy whose functional White House position is not entirely clear and who might not even have a security clearance, held forth on the idea that maybe we shouldn't be so hard on white supremacists and that the idea of "lone wolf" terror ops was mostly bullshit. Every bit of that couldn't actually be more wrong. 

Trump's weird use of the term "on many sides" makes it seem like anti-racist or anti-fascist groups also were indulging in violence. He attributes the counter-protestors' existence as provocation enough for what happened to them? He blames the people standing up to hate as being also biased? His flabby response heartened the so-called "alt-right" (Nazis) by letting them believe he loves them too much to attribute blame to them. 

President Obama was regularly accused of appeasement. I have always maintained that this was a word deployed by people who did not understand the nuances of power, and would not know "appeasement" for "détente". But I have no problem seeing Trump as appeasing the white racists who helped elect him, in much the same way as I see appeasement in his stance on Russian sanctions, and his supposedly sarcastic "thanking" of Putin for the supposed reduction in his State Department staff in Russia. 

Trump is a stupid weakling who supports bias and hate, domestic terrorism, and entertains delusions of us making nice with a foreign power who means to undermine us. And any person who ever used the "appeasement" line regarding Obama, but supports Trump right now, is shit. (This would also include people saying the exact right things about domestic terror and against the Nazis gathered in Charlottesville. Say the exact right things all you want--but what are you doing about the birther your party made happen to our country? What standard do you even hold him to?)

The rise of Trump, the so-called "Trump Effect", is definitely a factor in reinforcing racist bias and emboldening hate groups to believe they can operate without fear. We need to call it that. We need to see an end to Trumpism. And that means ending Trump. 

 

JFC Another TrumpWorld Grab-Bag?

You know, I started doing these "TrumpWorld Grab-Bag" things because there would just be too many Trump stories, and they sort of held together, and they sort of didn't but there were just too many to do single blog-posts about. I couldn't just pick one and move on with my life. Not at all! I had to gather up the half dozen or dozen links or whatever I was presented with because it all seemed relevant in some way. And then I would do a couple a week or whatever. 

But this last 24 hours? It feels vaguely accelerated. So, let's say you know that Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who met with Trump, Jr. last year, was in the US as counsel on a money-laundering case that was settled after the US Attorney on that case, Preet Bharara, was fired.  (This itself might not even be all that dodgy--I am no judge of how solid the case was.) What is new though, is that she also represented the FSB in a property dispute. I guess this sticks out as relevant to me because it shows she's done work on the Russian government's behalf and I can see where doing something to relieve sanctions against Russia would be in the same vein. But going back to that thing where US Attorney's offices might be politically compromised, I do note there is a story about Trump breaking with custom (not that he necessarily knows from custom) and meeting with a US Attorney candidate for the District of Columbia before her selection.

I don't know what to make of that, or even if I have anything to make of it--it just strikes me as interesting.

In other news, I guess it's no surprise that some people in the White House have made statements about ending Russian sanctions, like, for example, giving back the two compounds that seem to have been used for spying. Seb Gorka is one.  It looks like newly-minted White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci is probably in the same boat--and probably for reasons.

That's pretty interesting, too. It keeps coming back to that sanctions issue.

Which brings me to the big breaking story--AG Jeff Sessions apparently had a meeting with Ambassador Kislyak at the Mayflower Hotel, and they discussed policy relating to the Trump Campaign. My guess, since Sessions ruled out discussion of campaign interference--sanctions! Where did the Trump campaign stand on sanctions, anyway? Would they help Russia out?  After all, it was costing folks money, right?

It's a weird revelation coming so fast on the heels of an interview where President Trump seemed unhappy with Sessions' recusal from matters related to the Russian investigation, and potentially wanted him out. It's sort of a dumb revelation if it came from the White House, because it only goes to show that there was substantive dialogue between the Trump campaign and Russia--which doesn't alleviate the appearance of collusion. It also is kind of dumb if it reveals anything about IC sources that lets other countries know how we're listening. But let's leave open the other possibility--Russia can leak. Hell, just a minute ago, Foreign Minister Lavrov joked about how often Trump and Putin met at G20.  They can pull that kind of shit, now, because this White House is compromised.

But it's possible that this info was already in reporters' hands for awhile, while they tried to vet it.  Again, since Sessions lied about the existence of any meetings at all, anything he says about the existence of meetings or what was said at them becomes suspect.

And just as an aside, since this doesn't fit in (or maybe just--yet) with the rest of this Grab-Bag--Jared Kushner has updated his financial disclosure forms again, having missed 77 assets totaling somewhere between $10 and $100 million. You know. Couch change. Just like his security clearance docs that had to be amended for dozens of foreign contacts--I'm just saying. I wonder if these things are more "advertant" than "inadvertent" when he "forgets" them. Not that I know why.

UPDATE: Aw hell, this last 24 hours was so busy I forgot the thing where Senator Burr confirmed what I was saying about Rep. Devin Nunes' unmasking stuff being an apparent waste.

Trumpworld Grab-Bag: The Lost Art of Vetting

This is almost going to be too brief to be an honest to goodness "Trumpworld Grab-Bag" post, because it's really just about three guys: Michael Flynn, Sebastian Gorka, and Carter Page. I have issues with the Trump Administration's basic lack of sense on most issues, but the one that literally blows my mind the most is the national security thing. Trump says things that imply he'll be very strong on national security, and then...

He has people brought into his circle that just aren't the best, that are getting paid by other countries, and that seem like the kind of worldliness-challenged folks that act like a semi-permeable membrane for flow of information between Team Trump and who-knows-who.

Take Michael Flynn's known paid assistance to Turkey while not just being a Trump campaign policy advisor, but also receiving intelligence reports alongside of Trump. It turns out that that Turkey connection goes a bit deeper--and intersects with Russia. Now, you could always question Flynn's judgment regarding his RT involvement, but this goes a little farther. He knowingly was accepting money from foreign interests--full stop. One might want to imagine that a US military man with his distinguished record is capable of discerning and respecting that there are activities that don't befit the role of acting fully in the interest of his own country. US. Rep. Chaffetz' s assessment is stark: there is no evidence that he complied with the law. That means, he very likely broke the law. (Lock him up?)

But Trump chose this person and trusted him. Maybe because he saw him on tv. Trump seems to trust a lot of what he sees on tv.

See also: Sebastian Gorka. I feel like some aspect of calling him a "Nazi" or "Nazi-sympathizer" may be overstated and overlooks the more apparent problem with his participation in reviewing and effecting foreign policy for the US--his credentials look hyped. Haaretz has been doing real investigative vetting of Gorka's credentials. As Buzzfeed shows, Hungary didn't have a use for someone of his "skillset". That sounds...problematic.

Which brings us to still-talking Carter Page--who looked like the kind of doofus that the Rusians might use to try to cruise on inside the Trump campaign. Again--warning flags--but not enough to keep him off the campaign.

So--the best people? Or the most questionable? Seems like the latter, and that's a real problem--not fake news.